Roughing it in style in Port Douglas

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So, Tiger Airways. Tiger Airways are the newest, most controversial budget airline in Australia (of which there is a surprising lack. The common argument is that Australia simply does not have the population to support a network of low-cost carriers. See below). Similar to Ryanair in operandi, it appears their chief difference is that Ryanair is infamous for late flights, Tiger are infamous for cancelling flights. The conspiracy theory is; if your flight is unpopular one day, i.e. not near full, then it is not economically viable for Tiger to fly the plane. So they invent a reason for the cancellation and push as many plebs onto the next plane as they can. If they can.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Our flight was leaving Melbourne at 10pm, arriving Cairns at 1.30am. Just before 4.30pm, we were at work, we had a message from Tiger – your plane is cancelled, please ring our call centre.
The long and the short of it is, they were going to bump us onto the next flight until, as I was talking to the ooh-so-annoying woman at their call centre, the remaining seats were taken as she un-checked us in from one flight and attempted to re-check us into the other one.
Refund or next flight?
It’s Thursday, our return flight is Tuesday morning. If we can’t take the Friday flight the next one is Saturday, landing on Sunday.
Refund.
There was a flight leaving on Friday morning at 6am from Melbourne to Cairns on Jetstar (the budget subsidiary of Quantas). The one way flight was more than our entire itinerary on Tiger. We bought it.
A completely unexpected bonus of this was that our colleague, Alex, who we didn’t know particularly well at the time, was also flying out of Melbourne about an hour later than us, so offered to put us up for the evening at her house and drive us to the airport the next morning. It was a lovely gesture that was really appreciated. We enjoyed a very pleasant evening with her family and pet parrots. One of whom shat on my head while a photo was being taken.

Allen, in another legend-making move, had suggested a short excursion to Port Douglas, about an hour drive north of Cairns in Queensland. His auntie has a house there that she rents out and it would be free for a long weekend for the three of us. He'd be near Brisbane anyway, as he was helping Mark move house, from Miranda to Queensland, over the several days prior.
We later found out that his auntie rents this place out for $520 a night in high season! See the link to the house below, if you fancy a good time in Port Douglas:

http://www.realholidays.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=o&tm=1283297086&cc=&id=404760029&f=0&fmt=&t=hol&s=qld&c=70775159&p=10&header=&ty=

Not only was this appealing to us as we were freezing our mushiskas off in Melbourne and it is not called tropical North Queensland for nothing, even in winter (I had, after all, promised Del two summers). Also, Queensland is one of only two states in Australia, read, the world, where you can hold, cuddle if you will, a koala. There was also the small matter of the Great Barrier Reef residing magnificently off-shore.
Two big ticks. One for Del and one for me.
Del did her amazing trick of falling asleep the instant she sat down on the plane seat and I chitchatted to a guy who had been on the Tiger flight the same as us the day before. He downed five Jim Beans and Coke during the 3 and a half hour flight – it took off at 6am!
It wasn’t so much a wall of heat that hit us when we got off the plane in Cairns and walked along the tarmac but it wasn’t far off. We were both reminded of when we landed in Antigua that first day. With the palm trees swaying near the airport and later the uncountable rows of cane fields along the highway, it felt like we had left our previous experience of Australia behind and landed on Guadeloupe or some other tropical island. It just didn’t feel like Australia, or the Australia we had known to date. Although the wide-brimmed hats and extensive beards of the ground crew and roadwork guys begged to differ.
Allen picked us up in an impressively large Commodore (Opel or Vauxhall, depending where you live!) and we drove north along the coast towards Port Douglas. As the song goes, the heat was hot and the ground was dry and the air was full of sound. Shades were needed for the first time in months and suddenly jeans weren’t a wise choice anymore. The road north is two-lane and it winds along the delightfully blue ocean in a jolly, slightly haphazard, meandering manner, passing through retail parks, then rock coast line, then jungle then sandy beaches. The sun was beating down and the big tropical palm fronds were folding over the road and it felt, suddenly, like we were on holiday.
“What do you guys want to do today?” asked Al.
“We should probably sort the boat out today to go out on the reef, just in case it’s booked up.”
“It’s low season now, so we may not need to do that but it would help us organise the rest of our time.”
“After we’ve done that and changed into proper summer clothes, I’m looking forward to going to the beach,” said Del.
Allen chuckled. “You can’t go to the beach, there are crocs.”
We looked at Allen a little blankly.
“Seriously,” he said, seeing our disbelieving faces. “There are crocs in the water, you can’t swim.”
Del wondered. “In the ocean?”
“They’re mostly in the rivers but yeah, they’re in the ocean too. They find them all the time up and down the coast. They find them in tourist areas, pick them up in boats, transport them 500ks up the coast, where no one is, let ‘em go, and two weeks later they’re back. They’re really good swimmers.”
I wondered. “In the ocean?”
Allen looked at us as if we’d just asked him where we could find the Dodo colony. “Mate, they’ve been found on the reef and in fishing nets.”
This brought a quiet into the car. After about a minute of silent contemplation of floating in the ocean 100 kilometres off-shore, being surrounded by hungry and irJuanitable crocodiles, trying to get back yet again to their home, after being carted away by people looking very much like us, we had something else to make us smile.
“Anyway, crocs aren’t even the problem either.”
Another pause, heavy with floating worry.
“It’s the stingers that are really dangerous.”
More dangerous than crocodiles? What could be more dangerous than a five metre, disgruntled crocodile?
“It’s getting towards the end of stinger season here, they’re here all the way through the summer but they’ll still be heaps around.”
A stinger is the colloquial name for the Box Jellyfish. Apparently, not a true jellyfish in the strictest sense, it’s still one of the most venomous creatures in the world. Full size, its “box” can be 30cm in diameter and its tentacles, of which there can be upwards of 15 on each corner, each with thousands of stinging cells that are activated instantly on contact, can be three metres in length. Oh, and it’s invisible when you’re in the water.
“Apparently, it’s the most agonising pain imaginable,” elaborated Al. “I once heard a story of a surfer getting stung and when they brought him in he was screaming his head off. Thing was, he was unconscious.”
We looked over at the wonderful vista to our right. All blue water and bright light and certain death.
“There’s another stinger too called Irukandji. That’ll kill you too.”

Good story: When Allen was in London, a girl that he knew from school who was travelling in Africa wrote an email to all her friends and family as means of an update. The first line read: “Mum, don’t worry, I am fine.” Her and her group had been camping next to small lake, more a pond, in an area that locals said there were no crocs. She and a few friends decided to go for a late night swim and went into the pool. She lay on her back looking up at the sky, floating along quietly. Then all hell broke loose and she ended up underwater. She was dragged out by her mates with a gash down her forehead leading into her hairline. They reckon that she had drifted on the surface and bumped a crocodile with her head! The crocodile, being as surprised as her, just lashed out wildly and scarpered. The scar is small but still visible to this day. A reminder of the day she survived headbutting a crocodile in Africa. As Al said, if that ever happened to you, don’t do anything risky for the rest of your life, because you just used up every morsel of luck you’ll ever have.

Port Douglas has the instant feel of a holiday town. The main strip is full of pubs restaurants and cafes. The sun beat down and both Del and I luxuriated in the heat. We went first to the tourist information centre where we booked a boat leaving at 8:30am the next morning for the reef and went to the local supermarket to pick up enough food and most importantly, beer, to last us the long weekend. Then, we were eager to see Al's auntie's place.
A ten minute drive out of town, the house stood on a hill that was steep enough you would be glad not to have to walk up, its green roof and balcony peeping though a break in the forest. The house stood on two levels, with two bedrooms downstairs, a laundry room and an incredibly enticing swimming pool. Upstairs, three more bedrooms, two bathrooms and an open-plan, in every sense of the word, kitchen-living room-balcony. Open-plan and open to the elements. There were more open doors than there were walls.
We were all drawn to the balcony as if we'd never seen the outside world. Trees and dense bush led all the way to the cane fields spreading down to the bottom of the hill, and an unbroken view down to yet more cane fields, Port Douglas and ultimately, the shimmering sea.
If we couldn't swim in the sea then the pool was the next best option. After we raked out the leaves of course. Over dinner that night Al told us about the goanna in the garden. A goanna is a type of monitor lizard that roams the countryside of Australia. In case you hadn't realised, there's a lot of countryside in Australia for all manner of things to roam around in and grow big. We'd come across a goanna in Kangaroo Valley near Sydney and had been stunned by the size of it. Well over a metre long, with a serpent's tongue and equipped with a set of claws that can haul it's substantial bulk up trees in seconds, they're a serious predator and not something you want to wander into unawares. Apparently, his auntie has also heard a cassowary from the balcony, the steep hill we drove up to get to the house, is called Cassowary Hill after all. The cassowary is Australia's heaviest flightless birds, the emu is the largest. However, put a cassowary and an emu together and you'll have emu burgers. The cassowary has got to be the most frightening creature, not including crocodiles or Great White Sharks (funny, they're all in Australia) since the dinosaurs. With its vividly blue neck, impressive crest, large beak and massive legs, complete with three-pronged velociraptor feet, the cassowary is an impressive sight. It's also a rare sight, nowadays, suffering from habitat loss and fragmentation and unfortunate encounters with humans and dogs.
As we sat on the balcony, which was to be the place we all three spent most of our happy time in Port Douglas, Del and I really began to relax into our holiday respite from the 9-5 in Melbourne that we'd left the UK for anyway. The XXXX, which tastes better in Australia, flowed and the talk ranged to all kinds of topics. Al, of course, brought out the 'fright folder', a collection of local newspaper cuttings his auntie had compiled of events over the last six or seven years, featuring confrontations between the residents of Port Douglas and the incumbent wildlife and encouraged us to read it over the holiday. That evening, we became friends with the green tree frogs that made his and our bathrooms their favourite hangouts in the early part of the evenings. As green as frogs can possibly be and immensely fun to study at close quarters. A relatively early night for us all as the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) beckoned the next morning.
The next morning found us swallowing complementary motion-sickness tablets right after our complementary tea and cake. In port, the sea was a mirror, but we were cheerfully informed that 100k out to sea, this was certainly not the case. As luck would have it, the swells only came on in the afternoon and the ride out was lovely. Every time I go out on a boat I remember how much I love going out on boats – if that makes sense! The green hills receded and the Low Isles, the closest part of the GBR to the shore near Port Douglas, where Steve Irwin met his end, came and went. I remarked on this to Allen and expressed my sadness at the passing of someone I assumed would be some kind of Aussie icon.
“Mate, you poke enough deadly things and something, somewhere is gonna have you.”
Almost two hours later we were bobbing up and down in about 15metres of water and Australia was over the horizon. Firstly of course, this was odd, we were, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of the ocean and I could have dived to the bottom pretty easily. Secondly, an entire continent had just vanished out of sight as I had been watching it. Thirdly, looking around, I surveyed the largest reef system in the world, indeed the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms, visible from orbit and over 2600 kilometres in length, and was struck by the thought that, in 1770, when no one in the greater world knew this existed and Captain Cook was merrily sleeping off afternoon tea or his bottle of rum, depending on the time, and they ran into this leviathan, well, it didn't seem so silly of them. You could, with time and practice, pick out the differing shades and colours of the reef from the boat pretty easily. But you did have to be looking for it. The poor navigator and lookout who were on duty at the time the Endeavour smashed into the reef, must have caught some fearful flak from their shipmates, especially when the size of it became known, but most of it, I'm sure, looking out, would have been rather unfair. It wouldn't be dissimilar from walking into a patio door in the outback.
Donned safely in our sexy stinger suits (black, skin-hugging, all-in-one Lycra body gloves, yes, we looked that good) we entered the water. The visibility was outstanding. The coral was only five feet or so below the water in places and there were fish in abundance. Instead of me describing it for pages, have a look at the photos we took with our new, shiny underwater camera. We went to three dive sites that day and each one built our understanding of the reef and some of the organisms that call it home. We'd gone for a tour that had thirty people, instead of the sixty the usual boats have and which included several marine biologists. I like to think we learned some things. Like, the big clams you can see in some of the photos, which are a type of mollusc, are filter feeders, staying open to snaffle microscopic food particles in the water. Of course, their insides are yummy to some creatures, so when they sense shade, they close tightly shut to stay safe. Although, as they age, alas they struggle to stay completely closed and some soft tissue can still be accessible.
During the lunch break (which was awesome – so overindulged!) on board, in between the second and third swims, we had a lecture on the biology of the polyp, which is the little builder of this amazingly large reef. Polyps are tiny, soft animals that live in vast colonies and inside each polyp there is a particular type of one-celled algae that photosynthesises (hence why coral reefs are found close to the surface in tropical latitudes) and provides the polyp with food. In return, the polyp secretes calcium carbonate (one of the things that makes your teeth and bones), a rocky substance that furs up kettles and dishwashers in London and other places where there is hard water. This rocky outer skeleton, or exoskeleton, protects the polyp and the algae, and all these exoskeletons from all these polyps join together to form a reef. As one polyp dies, another grows on top of it and so on. Interestingly, it's the algae and their process of photosynthesis that makes the reef all the wonderful colours it is.
In all, the reef was excellent and we're so glad we went. For the corals, it is the best place. For fish, although we have only seen a minute part of the whole reef, for the part we have seen, we'd have to say that The Blue Lagoon in Fiji was better for amount and variety. It was brilliant to see it though and with more time in Port Douglas we would have gone out again and seen different parts of it. It is just so big though and in places so far off-shore, that it is impossible to see as much as you'd like. For that, it's not a bad analogy of Australia itself.
The next day we made our way to Kuranda Koala Gardens, just over an hour south, nearby to Cairns. Al, with the completely inexplicable lack of interest that seemingly most Australians show towards koalas and indeed most of their other native wildlife too, wasn't interested and settled on the balcony for the day. (I'm being unfair to Al here, as on one of our first outings in Australia, he had purposefully taken Del and I to a small wildlife reserve to see some of the native fauna and flora and spoken very knowledgeably about a great deal of them. As he does about a great many subjects. However, it is fair to say that, in our experience, Aussies, whether deliberately or not, ignore their weird and wonderful wildlife more times than they actively interact with it.)
This was to be a very special day for Delphine. She had been thinking of koalas, I'm reasonably sure, almost non-stop, since we had arrived in Australia and certainly since we had seen our first koala in Canberra. In Fiji, an English girl had dented Delphine's ideals of koalas slightly by suggesting that they were anything but soft. Del just couldn't believe it, indeed refused to believe that something that looked like such an inviting ball of fluff could be anything other than the softest soft. Still, that girl had said....
Well, Kuranda Koala Gardens is unbelievably poorly signposted (remember what I said about Aussies' attitude towards koalas? If it had been a sporting venue or casino there would have been signs all over the place!) but through luck and the law of averages, we made it. Del leapt over the turnstiles and careened towards the koala enclosure while I distracted the security guards by throwing money at the teller. I followed her squeals to the koalas. Indeed, koalas are cute. Very cute.
The guy and girl park wardens were there in front of a coloured background, him with a large camera and flash. The lady warden had a female in her arms. Del waved her koala ticket spasmodically, too excited to speak any language. We lucked out again. Instead of being overly concerned by how much their koala was about to be squeezed by this hyperventilating tourist, wearing a koala T-shirt, and being wary, the two wardens saw a kindred spirit. A koala enthusiast.
The girl smiled at Del, “Would you like to hold her?”
The koala's ears pricked up at the note Del emitted but it remained passively conscious.
Del received some instructions about how to make like a gum tree and before Del could say anything resembling consonants, a real, live koala was placed in her arms. From here I'm going to leave it to Del to tell you about the experience.



The next day, we chilled. Chilled long and hard into the afternoon. Really, there is nothing like doing nothing. Eventually, we gathered enough of ourselves together to visit Daintree Rainforest, reputed by Allen to be the oldest rainforest in the world. It certainly makes nice tea, which I had been enjoying for the last several days. Daintree is the largest continuous area of tropical rainforest in Australia and is home to the famous Mossman Gorge. It contains something like a third of all the frog, reptile, and marsupial species in Australia, and heaps of bat and butterfly species. We had a pleasant 3 or 4 kilometre walk along a circular track, stopping on the way to take photos of the weird and wonderful shapes of the buttress roots the trees use to keep put in the mushy sodden soil.
We had an awesome time in Port Douglas and it really was over too soon. Amazingly, the Tiger flight at 2am on Tuesday morning actually took off. Even more amazing, it was jammed packed with not a free seat on the plane. We said our goodbyes to Allen, after he again, drove us to the airport and look forward to returning all his wonderful favours the next time he's in Europe. Thanks a million, Al!

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Photos

Blue Ulysses butterfly
So gorgeous. Caught him in the wild.

A green frog in the bathroom
Normal in Port Douglas

Look at its fingers!
Just like a fairy tale frog.

Cassowary sign
Australia has got great signs...